Slashdot hosts an interesting question: What is the Best Firewall for Servers?. Sushant Bhatia asks: “I maintain a bunch of servers (Win 2003/XP Pro) at our labs in the university. Of late, the number of attacks on the computers has been more noticeable. The university provides firewall software (Kerio) but that doesn’t work with Win 2003 (works with XP). And so we keep getting hit by zombie machines taken over in the Education Department or from Liberal Arts :-). So what does the Slashdot crowd use when they need to secure their Linux and Windows servers? Does it cost less than US$100?”
Slashdot is filled with trolls, so setting your threshold around 4 raises the level of discussion and lowers the number of responses to read (although the rebar and concrete answer was a keeper). Interesting that the responses were pretty strongly “FreeBSD.” An answer near the bottom points out the latest W2K3 service pack provides the WinXP firewall to W2K3 servers. Another posting argues that each Windows machine needs its own firewall in addition to the perimeter. The perimeter defense was proven to have some serious flaws in the fall of Troy. Amazing that it is still considered.